1. Technical Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention generally relate to thermal management. In particular, certain embodiments relate to narrowing the range between operating points chosen by a thermal management controller.
2. Discussion
The popularity of computing systems continues to grow and the demand for more complex processing architectures has reached new heights. As a result, modern workloads and microprocessors can consume more power and generate more heat than previously experienced. In fact, the heat generated may limit the performance and necessitate relatively expensive thermal solutions. Software-based thermal management solutions have been developed to address this concern, but some of these solutions require monitoring of complex variables and can lead to relatively high computational costs. In addition, the reaction time of software-based solutions may be unacceptable for certain emergency situations.
Hardware-based thermal management solutions, on the other hand, react more quickly, while even small amounts of input data are sufficient for suitable performance. For example, certain approaches throttle the processor frequency to a lower frequency when the temperature is relatively high in order to limit power consumption and heat generation. When the temperature declines, the operating frequency may be switched back to the maximum frequency. Thus, such a solution may be able to make throttling decisions based on a relatively limited amount of data, (i.e., whether the temperature is above or below a given threshold).
If the usage model is not too thermally limited (e.g., the optimal throttling frequency is only a few percent less than the maximum frequency) the risk of unused potential may be rather low. For systems that are highly thermally limited, however, such an approach may incur too high a risk of performance loss from alternating between two frequencies that are far from each other. Because microprocessors may be becoming more and more thermally limited, this issue may increase in importance.